


moments of collapse

by serpentheir



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Archie Andrews Being an Asshole, Betty Cooper Being an Asshole, F/M, Gen, Hurt Jughead Jones, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Cheating, a very vague richard siken reference, but everything i write is within the context of jarchie, i never thought id have to put the barchie tag on a fic but here we are, its more of a content warning than a category, love that those are major tags, not explicitly within a jarchie context, so i promise the energy is There in a way, the andrews treehouse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:47:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23678626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serpentheir/pseuds/serpentheir
Summary: Betty doesn’t even try to stop him. She doesn’t have anything left to say; she knows it’s pointless now. Jughead grabs his stuff, shoving his hat and his jacket and a shirt and a notebook and anything he can grab within reach to bring something that’s his out the door with him. It’s funny the things your muscles remember know how to do. Funny how, this whole time, some part of him has always been ready to leave again, or ready to be left.takes place post-s4e17 (spoiler warnings for s4).
Relationships: Archie Andrews & Jughead Jones, Archie Andrews/Betty Cooper, Archie Andrews/Jughead Jones, Betty Cooper & Jughead Jones, Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 3
Kudos: 66





	moments of collapse

**Author's Note:**

> (alternately titled "Riverdale Writers, Fuck Around And Find Out")  
> it's me back again with another short coping fic  
> this is sort of an alternate ending to s4e17 in which betty tells jughead that night about her Moment with archie and it fucks jughead up, sorry i only write sad things :)  
> note: if you found this fic through the betty/archie tag, i should warn you that because this fic is from jughead's POV, it doesn't take a very positive stance towards barchie so this may not be the type of fic you're looking for!

Betty doesn’t even try to stop him. She doesn’t have anything left to say; she knows it’s pointless now. Jughead grabs his stuff, shoving his hat and his jacket and a shirt and a notebook and anything he can grab within reach to bring something that’s _his_ out the door with him. It’s funny the things your muscles remember know how to do. Funny how, this whole time, some part of him has always been ready to leave again, or ready to be left. 

_The first time_ , he catches himself thinking, the _first time_ the three of them went through his home and looked at everything, inspected it, gone behind his back to look at things they shouldn’t have seen. The first time, it _hurt_ , of course it did, but it was a sharp pain. Sometimes those are easier to deal with. A paper cut versus a stomachache. There’s a reason you wonder if you’re dying when your stomach hurts a little too much for a little too long. When the pain is dull and hollow, you can’t quite tell what you’re feeling, and it makes it scarier. The loss is deeper this time, and harder to figure out. Like someone’s gone through his house and thrown every door and cabinet open and pulled everything out onto the floor. 

He leaves quiet so his dad and Alice don’t hear. They probably wouldn’t even ask if they did hear him -- after all, him leaving to spend a late night at Pop’s or Archie’s isn’t uncommon -- but knowing he won’t get in trouble doesn’t make him feel any less like he’s leaving a home he was never supposed to be a part of in the first place.

Maybe the whole thing had been a fluke, the entire time. Maybe he’d faked it well enough to make Betty believe that he was okay enough for her. That he understood well enough and supported her in the right ways. Hell, he’d thought the whole fake-dying thing had brought them closer, if anything.

He manages to hold his breath and keep it together, and thank god he makes it out of the house before he breaks.

He’s just standing in the middle of the sidewalk up to Betty’s house, and everything is wrong, and he’s crying, and he’s thinking to himself “I’m crying in the middle of Betty’s sidewalk”, and he realizes he didn’t even bring his laptop.

It hits him, suddenly, how ridiculous he must look standing there under the streetlights, bag full of stuff on his shoulder like a little kid running away. The trailer’s a no-go, he doesn’t know what state it’s in anymore; he doesn’t feel like sitting in Pop’s for hours with nothing to do; he doesn’t have any clothes to wash so he can’t spend the night at the Laundromat. But he takes off anyway, down the sidewalk -- _away from Archie’s house_ \-- and to the end of the street, around the corner into the little cement alley before he realizes where he’s going.

The neighbors’ motion-sensor lights flick on as he walks past them. 

It’s been years since he snuck in through the backyard, and maybe he expected it to look different, because it doesn’t look any different at all and it feels like it should. The blue recycling can is the same. The top step missing a chunk of concrete. The fence door still hangs off its hinges a little, slanting downwards to the left, and he thinks, absentmindedly, _guess Fred never got around to fixing it_. And then he remembers, and then he makes himself stop remembering before it hurts. He jams the toe of his boot under the fence, like always, to prop it up so the two sides of the lock are even, and he slides the latch out and slinks through the door, careful to only open it a little bit so it doesn’t creak. 

He knows the treehouse is still there because, on more nights than he cares to admit, he’s stared at it out the window of the Coopers’ house when he couldn’t sleep. 

The bottom couple of slats have broken off, but he’s tall enough now to grab a branch and pull himself up to climb the last couple of steps and hoist himself onto the platform. He puts his bag down so slow that the weight of it makes his arms shake. It’s late enough that Mary wouldn’t be downstairs to hear him, but being there feels so wrong that he just wants to sink into the background as much as possible.

He backs himself into the corner, next to the little hole-turned-window, and from where he’s sitting he can see a light flick on from the second floor of the Andrews’ house. It casts a faint, warm little glow onto Betty’s window. She pulls her shades open and Jughead wonders, for a second, if the light woke her up, but she doesn’t open the window, doesn’t say anything, just reaches over and turns her bedside lamp on, too. At first, Jughead can’t tell what she’s looking at until he remembers, stupidly, whose bedroom is across the way.

He’s got that feeling again, the someone-opened-up-all-the-doors-and-took-everything feeling, but he can’t take his eyes off of her. So he stays pressed up against the wall of the treehouse and watches them watch each other, all too aware of how creepy it is. After a while, her light goes out, and so does Archie’s. 

He doesn’t want to think about how long Archie and Betty have been friends without him. Sure, it was Archie-and-Betty-and-Jughead, but he’d always been the odd one out.

 _His_ bedroom window, the most recent time he’d actually _had_ a room of his own, had just looked out onto a chain-link fence and a swath of scrubby yellow grass.

He’d never had to wonder what Betty and Archie were like when they spent time together without him -- he’d always felt like a part of them, like he knew both of them well enough that they’d act the same way around each other as they did around him. He wonders, now, how many secrets like this they have.

Has he always just been the accessory, the necessary obstacle that two people who were meant to be together had to overcome?

He’s been tired for hours, he realizes. Bone tired. He gives in to the exhaustion, sliding down the wall of the treehouse until he’s lying flat on the ground. When he finally closes his eyes, he's still picturing Betty looking out the window, her hands braced on the windowsill like the prow of a ship. He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes until the image dissolves and all he sees is stars. He remembers something, then, and opens his eyes to check: sure enough, the roof of the treehouse still has a plank missing. Through it, he can see the night sky, and the stars look exactly like they looked in his head.

**Author's Note:**

> join me in coping with the hell that was tonight's episode!  
> as always, comments are much appreciated!! you can find me on tumblr at @jugheadsucks


End file.
